Television is a powerful cultural force, yet television is a relatively inflexible medium. Viewer choice is confined to deciding whether to watch at all, selecting from at most a few hundred choices and the adaptation of their personal life to the broadcast schedule. The advent of the digital video recorder (DVR) has provided viewers with freedom of timing. In addition, DVRs provide viewers with pause, rewind or fast forward. DVRs give viewers more control but do not significantly change the nature of that viewing experience.
The advent of video over the Internet is starting to change the control relationship between viewer and broadcaster. Early Internet video systems were characterized by long waits for buffers to fill, low resolution and limited ability to select parts of a video stream to watch. However, bandwidth has improved sharply and video protocols have greatly improved. It is now possible to watch video over the Internet that has the following key attributes: high definition (HD) resolution, video startup of just a few seconds, delivery over a digital network to a computing device rather than an analog tuner, and the ability to jump to any point in a video stream in less than two seconds. The immediate benefit of these developments is that viewers can now watch what they want, whenever they want, outside of the control of large institutional gatekeepers. These are great developments, but much more is possible.